Career Booster

When faced with a problem, don’t do what you think makes sense. Instead, try to figure out what your boss (or another authority) wants as a solution. Then work on that, even if you think it’s pointless.

You have multiple roles. Make sure to use them to discreetly push the agendas and implement the priorities that best serve your career advancement.

Always treat your topic as the most important one, without discussing the bigger picture with your colleagues. Even if you notice that a colleague could use your help and it would benefit the company, stick to your own agenda and make sure you hit your target (see also: metrics).

If you do opt for a simple solution, it will only be taken seriously if it’s entirely built in Excel or PowerPoint.

As a sprint or PI comes to an end, make sure to close all tickets—even the ones that haven’t been worked on or completed. This ensures that you and your team look great. You can always create new tickets for the next sprint/PI. This approach results in beautiful statistics that, thankfully, bear no resemblance to the actual progress of the work.

To champion heroics, aim for the hockey stick shape in your burn-up charts. This way, you and your team can showcase how you heroically accomplish an infinite amount of work at the last moment. It also increases your chances of being named Team of the Year.

Seize every opportunity to present your project as red, only to skillfully turn it green at the right moment—proving that you and your team have what it takes to be real heroes. If that’s not feasible, the reverse strategy works just as well: keep your project green until the very end. This shields you from disruptive management attention and lets you step away just before it becomes glaringly, irreversibly red and crashes spectacularly.

Make yourself indispensable by leveraging your experience and relying on tried-and-true strategies you’re familiar with, regardless of whether they’re the best fit for the specific situation. This way, you ensure you never have to bother with new approaches.

Block the use of proven solutions and instead force your employees to develop their own. This not only showcases your innovative spirit but also ensures your team remains occupied for an extended period.

Use as many vague buzzwords as possible in your job postings, with a strong focus on SEO optimization. The goal is to generate the largest applicant pool imaginable—after all, the number of applicants is a key KPI when evaluating leadership performance - and the success of your empoyer branding initiatives.

If you attend a meeting, make sure to arrive at least 10 minutes late. Make your entrance count: in an in-person meeting, slam the door, shuffle chairs noisily, and open your laptop with a dramatic sigh. Interrupt the speaker to apologize for being late and explain that you were urgently needed in another important meeting. In an online meeting, unmute yourself immediately upon entry—but leave your camera off. Complain about your bad connection, then type "brb" in the chat and go get a coffee. This way, you effectively demonstrate importance, confidence, and a strong sense of self-care.

To support your career ambitions, feel free to shamelessly reuse the content and ideas of others—just rephrase them slightly and present them under a flashy new name as your own groundbreaking innovation. Using bold buzzwords, catchy acronyms, arbitrary statistics, and lots of visuals will help your presentation gain maximum traction with management.

A company’s success is, of course, measured by its numbers. And if those numbers don’t quite look the way they should, don’t waste time digging into root causes like poor quality, customer dissatisfaction, or lack of efficiency. Instead, reach for the trusted tool of financial engineering: twist, shift, and massage the figures until they shine—at least for now—regardless of what’s actually going on. The real problems? Simply push them into the next fiscal year, where they’ll either become someone else’s issue or, with a bit of luck, can be creatively rebranded once again.

Sales bonuses are based on order intake and revenue—so focus entirely on getting the customer’s signature. Ideally, this means you’ll earn your bonus for the order intake in year one, and then continue cashing in on the revenue in the following years—regardless of whether the projects were successfully completed or if the customer is even remotely satisfied.

To avoid being disturbed by colleagues, make strategic use of the status function in Outlook and Teams. Set yourself as “out of office” to subtly suggest that no one should expect a response. Important: your OOO message should always reference a conference or workshop—never imply actual time off. On the flip side, show extra dedication by answering emails even while on vacation or sick leave. And for maximum effect? Delay sending your replies so they land in inboxes in the middle of the night. Nothing says commitment like a 2:47 AM timestamp.

As an engineer, you’re expected to master complexity—which means solving problems with solutions so intricate that even you won’t fully understand them after a while, let alone your colleagues or customers. That’s the clearest way to demonstrate your true expertise.